DeFi has matured rapidly over the past few years, but one structural issue continues to undermine even the most promising protocols: misaligned incentives. Projects launch with ambitious roadmaps but rely heavily on token emissions, early liquidity, and short-term investor cycles to stay afloat. The result is a landscape where teams focus on boosting token prices, users chase temporary rewards, and long-term product development gets sidelined.

Flying Tulip steps into this environment with a very different mindset. Instead of relying on the typical Web3 funding mechanics, the project introduces a revenue-backed economic model that eliminates emissions entirely and forces the protocol to earn its success organically. It’s a surprisingly straightforward approach, but one that could shift how DeFi products are built and sustained.

 identifies a consistent pattern across the industry: protocols unlock liquidity far too early, teams receive token allocations long before meaningful adoption, and users flood in to farm airdrops or capture emissions before moving on to the next opportunity.

This dynamic creates constant churn. Liquidity spikes when incentives are generous, then collapses as soon as rewards taper off, something we’ve seen repeatedly across L2s, DEXs, and yield farms. Because teams and early investors often gain liquidity within 24 months, priority naturally shifts toward sustaining short-term excitement instead of building long-lasting economic systems. It’s a cycle that drains value from projects and leaves very little room for sustainable growth.

Flying Tulip’s model aims to realign these incentives by removing the mechanisms that create them in the first place.

A Revenue-Driven Architecture: How Flying Tulip Breaks the Cycle

Flying Tulip’s approach is simple but radical: the protocol has no team token allocation, no emissions, and no treasury set aside for future unlocks. Everything, from developer salaries to infrastructure costs, is funded by the actual revenue generated by the ecosystem’s products.

This model forces discipline. The protocol must build tools and markets that users genuinely want, because the only way the team survives is through utilisation, not speculation. It’s a return to fundamentals in an industry that often moves in the opposite direction.

At the heart of this ecosystem is a suite of integrated DeFi products, including a volatility-aware AMM, a hybrid AMM and CLOB execution model, perpetual futures, impact-based lending, a yield-bearing stablecoin (ftUSD), and a real-time insurance market. Each product can function independently, but they’re designed to strengthen one another, allowing liquidity and revenue to move across the system instead of remaining siloed.

Flying Tulip’s AMM is built to respond dynamically to shifting market conditions. Rather than relying on a fixed curve, it adapts in real-time to volatility, flattening during stable periods to minimize slippage and moving toward a more protective structure during turbulent markets. This allows traders to benefit from tighter pricing without compromising the safety of liquidity providers. The AMM also integrates seamlessly with a central limit order book, enabling the execution engine to source the best available price at any moment, a hybrid approach that blends the efficiency of automated liquidity with the precision of order-book trading.

The lending system follows a similarly responsive design. Instead of relying on static LTV ratios that ignore execution risk, impact-based lending adjusts borrowing power based on liquidity depth and expected slippage during liquidation. This creates a more accurate reflection of real market conditions and helps prevent bad debt.

Flying Tulip’s stablecoin, ftUSD, brings another layer of utility. Users can hold it as a simple settlement asset or stake it to receive sftUSD, which earns yield from delta-neutral strategies and other low-risk deployments. The key difference is that the yield isn’t generated through emissions or synthetic incentives, but through actual market activity.

The insurance market rounds out the ecosystem by offering continuous, streaming coverage rather than prepaid, fixed-term contracts. Coverage behaves more like a borrowable resource: users pay premiums only while their positions are active, while liquidity providers earn a steady yield as long as demand persists.

Together, these components form a tightly integrated network of revenue streams that reinforce each other rather than compete for liquidity.

A Sustainable Funding Model Built on Real Yield

Flying Tulip’s initial capital raise is also used differently from traditional token sales. Instead of selling tokens to fund development, the project raises stablecoins and major assets directly. These assets are held in a diversified vault designed to generate consistent, low–risk yields across high-liquidity venues.

The research paper’s backtesting indicates that this vault could generate approximately 

 from yield alone, with the majority of this coming from stablecoin deployments on platforms such as Aave, Syrup, Athena, and Ethena. Additional returns are generated from staked ETH, SOL, BNB, AVAX, and Sonic positions, all of which are selected based on liquidity depth and risk-adjusted performance.

A portion of this yield covers operating costs, while surplus revenue is used to buy back and burn FT tokens on the open market, a design that increases scarcity without relying on inflation.

The Pro-Rata Put Option: An Unusual but Effective Mechanism

One of Flying Tulip’s most intriguing features is the perpetual pro-rata put option granted to early contributors. This mechanism gives them the right to redeem their FT tokens at the value of their original contribution. If they choose to redeem, the tokens they return are permanently burned, reducing the circulating supply and giving remaining holders a larger proportional share of the ecosystem.

This creates a natural stabilising effect. The put option establishes a psychological and mechanical price floor, while the burn mechanism steadily enhances token scarcity as redemptions occur. Over time, this feedback loop helps reinforce long-term value while giving early contributors a clear, risk-controlled exit path.

Where Flying Tulip Fits in the DeFi Landscape

In an industry dominated by protocols that depend on inflationary incentives, Flying Tulip has positioned itself as a counter-model, one focused on sustainability, capital efficiency, and genuine utility. Its integrated design avoids the fragmentation seen in many DeFi ecosystems, where each product operates independently and competes for liquidity. Instead, revenue flows between products, creating a cohesive environment where value generation is shared.

This approach stands apart in a landscape filled with short-lived yield farms, hyper-financialized point systems, and tokenomics designed around temporary hype cycles. But as competition intensifies and users become more discerning, protocols that can sustain themselves without continuous emissions may gain a meaningful advantage.

Flying Tulip’s long-term success will ultimately depend on adoption, liquidity, and the strength of its product suite, but the foundation it has built offers a refreshingly grounded alternative to the typical DeFi playbook.

Flying Tulip challenges many of the assumptions that have shaped DeFi’s early years. By eliminating emissions, removing team allocations, and reinforcing value through real revenue and adaptive design, it represents a shift toward a more sustainable model for decentralised finance.

To explore Flying Tulip’s full architecture, economic framework, and revenue projections, the complete research paper provides a comprehensive examination of the protocol’s design philosophy and long-term vision.

Flying Tulip offers a revenue-backed, emission-free DeFi model that realigns incentives through sustainable design and adaptive markets.


Flying Tulip’s Revenue-Backed Model: A Bold Answer to DeFi’s Incentive Crisis

Aethir is a decentralized cloud infrastructure network designed to improve access to high-performance computing, especially GPU power, while enhancing scalability and cost efficiency. Instead of relying on centralized data centers, Aethir operates through a globally distributed ecosystem of more than 430,000 GPUs (self-reported) across 93 countries. This includes both consumer- and enterprise-grade hardware, such as NVIDIA H200s, which enables a flexible and diverse compute network. By aggregating underused resources and allocating them dynamically based on demand, Aethir supports use cases ranging from cloud gaming and AI model training to enterprise-level computing workloads.

Aethir’s infrastructure operates on a three-tier architecture: Network, Edge, and Application, engineered to reduce latency and optimize the distribution of computational workloads. Edge nodes serve as local gateways, coordinating nearby clusters to enable swift failover and dynamic resource allocation, thereby maintaining consistent performance for end users. The platform also integrates a staking and slashing mechanism powered by its native ATH token, ensuring network reliability, incentivizing honest behavior, and aligning the interests of participants throughout the ecosystem.

With over 200 gaming studio partners, a reported capacity to serve up to 221 million monthly users, and a focus on decentralization, Aethir differentiates itself by offering an alternative to costly, centralized cloud platforms like AWS and Google Cloud.

: Aethir operates a global network of over 430,000 GPUs across 93 countries, offering both consumer- and enterprise-grade hardware for compute-intensive tasks.

: Q3 2025 saw self-reported revenue of ~US $39.8 million and 130 million monthly compute hours (≈ +20% QoQ), with ARR at US $114 million and outlook towards US $160 million.

: The network is evolving to separate retail-grade GPUs (i.e. cloud gaming) from enterprise-grade units (i.e. AI modeling and LLMs), allowing for targeted resource deployment and scalability.

: The company is transitioning from infrastructure-only to full-stack ecosystem provider through significant partnerships (e.g., with Predictive Oncology and the “AI Unbundled Alliance”) and new collaborators, including Arizona State University, Sogni, Respeecher, and Messiah Network.

: The surge in demand for GPU compute (driven by AI and cloud gaming), along with semiconductor supply-chain and geopolitical risks facing centralized providers, favor decentralized models like Aethir’s.

: Success rests on scaling infrastructure reliably, expanding enterprise-grade GPU capacity, maintaining cost & latency advantages, and executing on the developer/partnership ecosystem, potentially evolving into a foundational layer of the decentralised compute stack.

Q3 2025 marked another record-breaking quarter for Aethir, with self-reported revenue reaching $39.8 million, solidifying its position as the highest-earning DePIN project by absolute revenue. These figures remain off-chain and thus unverified, as House of Chimera cannot independently confirm their accuracy. The network’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) currently stands at $114 million, with projections suggesting it could reach $160 million based on recent quarterly performance. Additionally, Aethir reported an average of 130 million compute hours per month, reflecting a ~20% quarter-over-quarter increase in utilization.

Unlike most DePIN networks, which have experienced declining revenues according to on-chain data, Aethir continues to outperform peers such as Akash, GeodNet, io.net, and Edge, underscoring its strong growth trajectory. This resilience stems from the surging global demand for GPU-powered computing, driven by the accelerating adoption of AI across the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 industries. The trend mirrors rising search interest and robust financial results from traditional chip manufacturers like Nvidia and TSMC. Furthermore, geopolitical tensions and supply chain disruptions, particularly between the U.S. and China, continue to underscore the strategic importance of decentralized infrastructure. With no single point of control or reliance on physical data hubs, platforms like Aethir stand out as more resilient alternatives amid increasing regulatory and trade uncertainties.

As AI models continue to grow in size and computational complexity, the shortage of available compute remains one of the most pressing bottlenecks in the digital economy. Global demand for GPU capacity is expected to grow by more than 60% year-over-year, supported by an expanding enterprise adoption base, particularly in Europe, where AI implementation rates among large organizations have nearly doubled. Aethir’s distributed GPU infrastructure and multi-tier architecture uniquely position it to address this demand, offering granular resource allocation that differentiates between high-performance AI workloads and latency-sensitive gaming environments.

In addition to AI, Aethir maintains a strong position in the cloud gaming sector, partnering with over 230 gaming studios and operating more than 650 clusters that support approximately 14 million active players worldwide. Although the growth trajectory in gaming remains steadier than in AI, it provides a consistent, subscription-based revenue stream as cloud-native gaming gains traction over hardware-dependent alternatives. This diversification strengthens Aethir’s business fundamentals, ensuring balanced exposure across multiple compute-intensive verticals.

The Aethir Network has continued to scale its computational capacity, now comprising over 437,000 GPUs with an aggregate performance of approximately 32.9 million TFlops, up from 23.6 million TFlops in Q1 2025. The network's theoretical maximum concurrent player capacity has risen from 209 million to 221 million, while the average compute power per GPU has increased from 59 to 75 TFlops. This substantial improvement indicates the integration of more advanced, enterprise-grade GPUs into Aethir’s infrastructure, consistent with its strategic pivot toward serving AI and machine learning workloads alongside gaming.

Whereas gaming workloads primarily rely on consumer-grade GPUs such as the RTX 4080–5090 series, AI applications require high-performance units like NVIDIA’s H100 and H200, which deliver significantly higher computational throughput. Aethir’s approach appears to segment GPU allocation, dedicating retail-grade hardware to cloud gaming clusters and reserving enterprise-grade resources for AI clients. This model enhances operational efficiency, workload optimization, and service differentiation, allowing Aethir to effectively balance the performance demands of both AI and gaming verticals within its decentralized network.

In Q3, the network delivered an estimated 28 million GPU hours per week, while its infrastructure now spans 93 countries (although regional GPU counts remain undisclosed). A globally distributed system of over 67,000 active Edge devices, deployed across 93 countries, plays a critical role as local gateways and orchestrators of GPU clusters, facilitating rapid resource reallocation, failover protection, and low latency for real-time workloads. These edge nodes enhance responsiveness by placing compute resources closer to end users, a design essential for applications such as cloud gaming and live AI inference. To learn more about how the Edge Device prevents latency: 

https://www.houseofchimera.com/blog/is-aethir-the-next-giant-in-cloud-gaming

Aethir has recently executed several high-impact strategic initiatives that clearly reflect its shift from a pure infrastructure provider to a full-stack ecosystem builder. The company announced a partnership with Predictive Oncology, involving a private investment of approximately US $344 million to establish what is described as a “Digital Asset Treasury” focused on the native token $ATH, essentially creating the first “Strategic Compute Reserve”. Under this framework, Predictive Oncology will deploy and monetize Aethir’s GPU infrastructure for enterprise AI workloads, then reinvest the realized revenue into additional ATH token purchases, thereby aligning token utility with the scale of the infrastructure.

Complementing this, Aethir has launched the AI Unbundled Alliance, an industry-wide collaborative platform with over 20 partners that offers GPU compute, data processing, blockchain oracles, and developer tooling in a single stack. One of the flagship additions to this ecosystem is Chainlink Labs, whose oracle infrastructure and the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) join forces with Aethir’s decentralized GPU cloud, enabling builders to author verifiable workflows spanning on-chain, off-chain APIs, and legacy systems. Through this alliance, members gain access to hackathon bounties, grants, co-marketing support, and early access to tools like CRE, delivering a seamless environment for Web3 AI innovation.

Arizona State University (ASU), Sogni, Respeecher, and Messiah Network have recently joined forces with Aethir, marking a significant expansion of its partnership ecosystem and signalling rising demand for its decentralized GPU infrastructure. In the ASU collaboration, Aethir is supporting a global AI & blockchain education initiative through the university’s Endless Games & Learning Lab, offering up to US $3 million in compute subsidies to empower student-researchers with enterprise-grade GPU access.

Meanwhile, Sogni teamed up with Aethir to power scalable creative AI workflows via its decentralized cloud, including a dedicated airdrop campaign for Aethir’s stakers and Edge holders, an effort aimed at blending GPU infrastructure with the creator economy. Aethir Respeecher, a voice-AI pioneer, became a compute-client of Aethir to scale high-fidelity speech synthesis projects globally, citing Aethir’s low-latency, globally distributed GPU cloud as a core enabler. Aethir Messiah Network likewise tapped Aethir’s infrastructure to enhance its Web3+AI platform capabilities.

Aethir is strategically positioned to capitalize on multiple macro- and sector-specific trends shaping the trajectory of decentralized infrastructure networks. With the global market for AI infrastructure forecast to grow from roughly US$35 billion in 2023 to over US$223 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of ~30%+, and data-centre capacity expected to triple by 2030 with ~70% of demand coming from AI workloads, the timing is favourable for decentralized GPU supply models. Because high-performance GPUs are in increasingly short supply, especially as AI workloads like large-language-model training, real-time agent-based systems, and generative AI scale, Aethir’s model of aggregating underutilised compute resources gives it a structural advantage in a supply-constrained environment.

On the sector-specific front, the sophistication of AI workloads means that enterprise-grade GPUs, as opposed to consumer-grade cards, are becoming increasingly essential. Aethir’s ability to segment its infrastructure between gaming and AI use cases enables operational flexibility and targeted scaling, which is key as it expands its enterprise-grade GPU inventory. Additionally, the explosion of edge computing, with AI and real-time applications demanding lower latency and local processing, adds another tailwind to decentralized networks that place compute closer to end-users. Geopolitical uncertainty and semiconductor supply-chain fragility, such as trade tensions between major economies that threaten centralized providers, may further reinforce demand for borderless, decentralized alternatives like Aethir, which are inherently more resilient to centralized bottlenecks.

Looking ahead, Aethir’s long-term competitiveness hinges on its ability to scale its infrastructure while maintaining reliability, expand its high-performance GPU capacity, and capitalize on structural shifts across the AI and cloud-gaming verticals. If successful, it could evolve into a foundational layer for the broader decentralised compute stack and, in specific verticals, rival some centralised incumbents over the coming cycles.

Explore Aethir’s Q3 2025 Growth Report with key financial results, operational metrics, and insights into market performance and strategic progress.

Aethir Growth Report Q3 2025: Key Financial and Operational Highlights

Since its emergence, the price of Bitcoin is believed to follow a four year cycle. Four years is also the interval of each Bitcoin halving. This has been considered an indicator for investors; at least up to now, this hypothesis still holds. However, with capital flows growing and the arrival of Wall Street giants, is this cyclical pattern still accurate. Since early 2024, the BTC price has broken its ATH three times, which raises the question of whether BTC has already peaked for this cycle or can still continue to rise. Let us explore this in the article through the correlations between macroeconomics and Bitcoin and take a brief look at altcoin season.

The Global M2 Money Supply reflects the total amount of money that can circulate in the economy, including cash, demand deposits, and savings that can be withdrawn immediately. It serves as a gauge of global liquidity. When M2 rises rapidly, money becomes cheaper, the cost of capital falls, and capital tends to flow into risk assets such as equities, real estate, and especially crypto. Over the past decade, Bitcoin has shown a close correlation with movements in M2. When global money supply rises or falls, the Bitcoin price reacts almost immediately, with a short delay.

Between 2020 and 2021, to rescue the global economy from the COVID-19 pandemic, money was continuously injected into markets. In March 2021, Global M2 year-over-year growth surged above 20%. Soon after, Bitcoin repeatedly set new highs at $61k in April 2021 and $67k in November 2021, while altcoins also rallied strongly.

Conversely, when the money supply is tightened and the Global M2 year-over-year growth turns negative, BTC tends to fall sharply and enter a bottoming zone. For example, in November 2022, after the Fed raised interest rates at the fastest pace in 40 years, Bitcoin fell sharply and hit a cycle bottom around $16k. Earlier this month, global M2 growth stood at -3.7%.

At present, although US interest rates remain high above 4%, Global M2 year-over-year growth has begun to recover to around 7% to 8%, and Bitcoin has set a new peak at about $125k at the end of Q3 2025. Expectations of a monetary policy pivot have prompted investors to act in advance.

In the cycles of 2013, 2017, and 2021, Bitcoin peaked when the Fed rate was below 1.3%. That was the era of cheap money, where investors were willing to accept risk to seek superior returns. Along with the substantial expansion of M2, abundant liquidity inflated the value of risk assets.

What is special about the current cycle is that Bitcoin has continued to break its ATH even as the Fed has kept rates above 4%, something that has never happened before. The reason does not lie in cheap money, but in the structural shift of capital flows and market confidence. Several factors may explain why the Bitcoin price keeps breaking ATH even though the Fed has tightened monetary policy for a long time:

The fourth Bitcoin halving took place in April 2024, reducing the block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs from BlackRock, Fidelity, Ark Invest, and others have legalized institutional capital flows, bringing Bitcoin into mainstream asset portfolios.

Digital Asset Treasuries of listed companies such as MicroStrategy, Tesla, and Block hold BTC as long-term reserves, locking up part of the circulating supply.

Expectation of a Fed Pivot. Investors are positioning early for a monetary easing cycle in 2025 when the Fed cuts rates.

For nearly two decades, the ‘Four Year Cycle’ model of Bitcoin price has been considered an essential reference framework for some investors. Every 210,000 blocks, the block reward is halved - an event called Halving. After each Halving, Bitcoin’s supply growth slows (supply becomes more deflationary), which can influence BTC’s price. In previous cycles, Bitcoin has typically gone on to reach a new all-time high (ATH) roughly one year after the Halving. This remains true to this day, after the Bitcoin halving in April 2024.

After each halving, the average cost to mine 1 BTC also rises sharply. According to The MinerMag, in Q2 of 2025, this figure is estimated at $60k to $90k per BTC. This is the economic floor of the network. When the price falls below this level, miners exit the market, causing the hashrate to decrease and the market to enter a self-balancing phase. This self-balancing mechanism makes Bitcoin resemble a digital commodity with a real production cost, creating long-term stability across cycles.

If the hypothesis about the Four Year Cycle remains accurate, then 2026 is forecast to be a year when BTC price will go down and will set a new ATH in 2029, which coincides with the time when interest rates are lower, around 2.5% according to the Fed’s dot plot projections.

However, there are still variables that may render the Four-Year Cycle no longer correct. In previous cycles, BTC was primarily held by miners, while in this cycle, there has been a clear shift as most BTC is currently held by ETFs. Unlike miners, who need to sell BTC to free up capital and reinvest in new hardware as their machines become outdated over time, ETFs are backed by investors and traditional funds, who tend to hold for the long term. In addition, after halving the estimated BTC mining cost from $60,000 to $90,000, the BTC price will not decline as profoundly as in previous cycles.

Similar to Global M2, stablecoins represent the total money supply injected into the crypto market. The total supply of stablecoins reflects the health of on-chain liquidity. When supply increases, new money enters the market. When supply decreases, capital flows out.

From after the halving in April 2024 to Q3 2025, the total stablecoin supply doubled, increasing from approximately $154 billion to $308 billion, following a prolonged decline from 2022 to 2023. This shows that on-chain liquidity is being reactivated alongside Bitcoin's rise.

Stablecoins play the role of the Global M2 of the crypto market, reflecting the readiness of investors to allocate capital.

When the Fed tightens, investors hold stablecoins as a short-term refuge similar to keeping cash in the traditional system.

When pivot expectations appear, stablecoins are released into the market, flow into liquidity pools, DeFi yield, or are swapped into BTC and ETH.

A notable point is that, in the previous cycle, stablecoins were backed only by companies such as Tether or Circle. In this cycle, however, stablecoins have emerged as a narrative, and more stablecoin issuers have appeared, including USDf of DWFLabs and USD1 of WLFI. This helps bring abundant liquidity and more choices for users.

Most people expect an altcoin season similar to the one in 2021. However, the current context is very different from the previous cycle. Although Bitcoin's price continues to break records and global M2 continues to rise, in altcoins, it is the opposite. Most altcoins have declined, and capital rotates quickly in line with narratives and ecosystems rather than growing together as in the previous cycle. See more about the altcoin season in the article here.

Ethereum is considered the flagship of altcoins, but in this cycle, it has not experienced a significant breakout. Although there are Spot ETFs and DATs for ETH, capital inflows remain significantly weaker than for Bitcoin, as investors can stake ETH directly, earning a yield of 4% to 5% per year. In contrast, ETFs do not provide this reward, and the companies that currently account for ETH's DATs, such as those in the ETH ecosystem, only represent a small, insignificant share compared to BTC DATs. The BTC Dominance index is currently around 59%, indicating that capital remains concentrated in Bitcoin, as the leading asset for institutions to focus on.

Overall, the Four-Year Cycle thesis remains valid to this point. If we follow this framework and the observed correlation between Bitcoin price and the U.S. Federal Funds Rate, BTC may have already reached the peak of this cycle.

However, this cycle is not identical to previous ones. The launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs has brought in long-term institutional capital. ETFs are now the largest holders of Bitcoin instead of miners, as in previous cycles, which may cause this cycle to not fully repeat the old pattern. Liquidity conditions also support further upside: global M2 is recovering, and the total supply of stablecoins has roughly doubled since 2024. The above factors may act as catalysts for the price of Bitcoin to continue setting new all-time highs in the near term.

At the same time, Bitcoin is increasingly being treated as a long-term reserve asset similar to digital gold, while its total market capitalization is still far below that of gold. In the long run, Bitcoin still has significant upside potential when compared to other assets such as gold.

Has Bitcoin reached its peak in 2025? Explore BTC’s price cycle, ETF inflows, and macro trends shaping its next move.

Has Bitcoin Reached Its Peak?

TALUS Network: Infrastructure for AvA Gaming and for Prediction AI

Prediction markets and AI are beginning to converge into one of the most powerful frontiers of Web3. AI agents are no longer limited to chatbots or content tools - they can analyze data, compete, and generate signals that can be verified on-chain. When combined with blockchain’s transparency and immutability, these agents open the door to fairer markets, new forms of speculation, and entirely novel digital economies. What if you could not only create your own AI agent, but also plug it directly into markets where its performance and outcomes are provably fair?

Beyond infrastructure, Talus is powering a new consumer frontier: AvA (Agent vs Agent) Gaming. In AvA, AI agents battle each other while humans speculate on the outcomes, creating a transparent, fair alternative to meme-coin speculation and traditional gambling. Their consumer platform, idol.fun, will be the first to host these games, proving how Talus infra unlocks Prediction AI and speculative markets at scale.

Talus Network builds decentralized infrastructure for Prediction AI and AvA Gaming, combining AI agents with blockchain transparency.

AvA (Agent vs Agent) Gaming lets AI agents compete while humans speculate on outcomes, creating a fair alternative to gambling and meme-coin trading.

The Nexus Framework integrates on-chain logic (Sui), Rust SDK, off-chain computation, and Walrus storage to power scalable agent workflows.

$US token underpins the ecosystem, used for payments, staking & participation, and governance.

Backed by Polychain, Animoca, and others, Talus raised $10M to drive its vision of an Autonomous AI Economy.

Talus is a decentralized infrastructure platform that powers revenue-generating agents for consumer experiences, enabling entirely new categories of information Markets. It utilizes autonomous and artificial intelligence to shape a better digital economy, aiming for a future where capital markets, gaming, social networks, and global services operate in a decentralized manner with greater accessibility, transparency, and efficiency for everyone.

AvA Gaming and Prediction AI cannot take off without two missing pieces: 

Transparent, decentralized agents to prevent rigged outcomes, 

and a distribution platform that lets anyone deploy and monetize games and markets.

Talus captures this in five core pillars, each shaping the foundation of its vision.

 By anchoring all outcomes onchain, Talus ensures AvA matches and Prediction AI markets are provably fair, giving speculators confidence to participate at scale. On-chain deployment frees agents from dependence on Big Tech platforms (such as Google) and reduces the risk of account bans or API shutdowns.

 Processes, actions, and outcomes are all recorded on-chain, allowing users to monitor and communities to verify.

 Agents can interact seamlessly with other on-chain applications, exchanging data, value, and call permissions across DeFi, NFTs, Social, and beyond.

Agents can be community-owned and governed through tokens or NFTs, evolving according to open and transparent rules.

Why this matters now: Prediction AI needs infra where agent decisions, odds, and outcomes are auditable - so AvA games and market primitives can’t be rigged. Talus provides that base layer.

In essence, to integrate AI with decentralized infrastructure, Talus needs to address two key problems:

Support sophisticated decision-making while preserving decentralization.

Smart contracts are powerful, but synchronous execution is costly and limited. The Talus Agentic Framework (TAF) fills the gap with an asynchronous, composable layer for off-chain computation. It standardizes inputs/outputs, verifiability, data interfaces, and payment flows. By abstracting general data services as Talus Tools and defining execution flows as Talus Workflows, TAF enables modular design and transparent coordination. This design directly supports AvA Gaming, where agent decisions and results must be publicly auditable to underpin speculation markets.

Enable secure, autonomous handling of data, resources, and authority

Talus addresses this challenge through two distinct solutions:

A shared on-chain entity that holds authority over resources and delegates permissions to Tools inside a workflow. With developer-defined data structures and policies, the Agent can orchestrate token swaps, capability consumption, or resource exchange with pre-configured vendors. In AvA Gaming, Talus agents called Idols act as the competitors - each with verifiable logic, actions, and results that markets on idol.fun can settle against transparently.

 a decentralized coordination layer that executes workflows in a trustless and permissionless way, distributes data and payments, ensures liveness across asynchronous steps, and supports conditional triggers and scheduling, thereby delivering true automation as a service.

Based on its current design, Talus is similar to n8n, a widely used open source workflow automation platform that combines AI with business process automation. The key difference is that Talus brings this model into Web3 with native on-chain execution and data handling, which enables verifiable transparency and permissionless coordination.

Nexus is at the heart of the Talus Technical Ecosystem. It is a fully on-chain framework designed for AI agents, enabling developers to build and deploy them with optimal performance, security, and cost efficiency. Nexus is also the competitive engine behind idol.fun, making AvA Gaming possible by managing matches, verifying results, and routing payouts.

Nexus is designed as a modular system with three core components:

: This is the backbone of Nexus, comprising smart contracts that run on the Sui blockchain. It manages workflows, execution, and coordination between agents. Every action is recorded on-chain, ensuring transparency, verifiability, and resistance to censorship.

 This SDK enables developers to easily interact with the blockchain, even if they are not familiar with Move programming. By using Rust, developers coming from a Web 2.0 background can deploy and manage agents without needing to learn a new programming language.

Heavy computations such as LLM inference and data-intensive tasks are processed off-chain. Instead of burdening the blockchain with high costs and latency, results are computed externally and then returned to the Sui blockchain as native objects, allowing workflows to continue seamlessly on-chain.

Nexus connects and coordinates across different layers of the Talus ecosystem:

 All agents run on Sui and are written in Sui Move. There are three package types:

Developers deploy Talus Agent Packages (TAP) to store workflows and custom logic.

Onchain Tools that leverage existing Sui packages, such as DEXs or lending protocols, to enable direct agent actions.

Nexus Onchain Components, maintained by Talus Labs, include primitives, the workflow manager, and the tool registry to standardize operations and enable tool discovery.

 Walrus is a decentralized data storage protocol built on the Sui blockchain. Within this architecture, Walrus provides decentralized storage for large or persistent data, including agent metadata, memory, and context. Only references or commitments are stored on-chain to reduce costs, while Walrus offers distributed, verifiable storage off-chain.

Compute-intensive tasks, such as LLM inference, image or NLP processing, mathematical calculations, and web crawling, are executed off-chain to optimize cost and performance. Nexus bridges on-chain and off-chain by keeping inference and computation external while anchoring decisions, commitments, and audit trails on-chain to ensure transparency and integrity.

Talus’ first consumer use case is AvA Gaming - AI vs AI competitions, where humans bet on outcomes. By providing Prediction AI in a high-stakes, transparent format, AvA becomes the wedge that drives broader adoption for Talus infra.

Talus aims to build the foundational infrastructure for the Autonomous Digital Economy, where AI agents are no longer just “wallet-attached bots” but fully on-chain entities with their own identities, assets, and workflows, enabling them to operate autonomously and generate revenue.

Talus has outlined a vision of building an Autonomous AI Economy on-chain. The current focus is on standardizing agents, then expanding through developer infrastructure, user-facing applications, with the long-term goal of enabling greater autonomy. Each milestone brings Talus closer to a future where agents operate as independent economic actors on-chain.

, planned for Q1 2026, is the first AvA Gaming platform for speculating on AI agent outcomes. It lowers the barriers for creators and invites speculators to bet transparently on matches, proving the power of Prediction AI at scale.

 introduces AI vs AI speculation as a new $100B+ market niche, where Talus ensures outcomes are transparent and immutable.

A no-code tool that lets anyone easily build and automate workflows through an intuitive interface. It serves as an Agent Marketplace (AM), allowing users to design, test, and deploy autonomous workflows without writing code.

 Break the traditional limitation that blockchains always require a human or oracle trigger. The goal is to empower agents to self-initiate actions once the necessary conditions are met, thereby completing the missing piece for true independence.

 Establish DAOs operated by agents, DeFi systems explicitly designed for agent cashflows, and an AI-native commerce layer where autonomous digital actors can represent businesses, banks, and institutions.

The unique strength of Talus lies in turning AI agents into entities that can act directly within the on-chain economy. While this vision is still unfolding, several potential real-world use cases illustrate how Talus agents could transform various sectors.

AvA Gaming and idol.fun allow agents to battle under transparent rules, outcomes are verified on-chain, and humans speculate freely. This is the first scaled Prediction AI experience and Talus’ consumer proof point.

In DeFi, agents can autonomously optimize yield farming, staking, risk management, and portfolio allocation. Users no longer need to handle complex operations, as AI takes care of decisions to maximize efficiency and safety.

In IoT, AI agents could directly manage physical devices. For example, an electric vehicle could autonomously make on-chain payments when charging, demonstrating the seamless link between physical assets and the digital economy.

Within the AI & Data ecosystem, Talus could enable developers and model providers to share data while benefiting from secure, fair monetization mechanisms.

However, these remain visions of the future, and there is still a long journey ahead for Talus Network to bring them to life truly.

$US is the economic center of the Talus ecosystem, designed to align usage, value, and growth.

The total supply is fixed at 10 billion tokens, and the model is deflationary with three primary use cases:

Pay for priority or trusted execution in Nexus. Users may pay in $SUI, and the system will automatically convert it to $US.

 Stake to operate Leader nodes or to register tools, with slashing in place to deter misconduct.

 Long-term holders gain governance rights and community privileges.

Tokenomics revolve around two reinforcing closed loops:

 Products attract users and developers, which creates more tools, agents, and applications, and this expansion broadens real-world use cases.

Token scarcity, together with utility that is tied to fees, creates demand, and value flows back to support the community and builders.

To nurture its early community, Talus introduced Tallys, a collection of 5,555 NFTs featuring the project mascot “Tally” with over 200 traits and several ultra-rare editions. More than simple collectibles, Tallys serve as badges of early supporters, granting holders early access to agent products, entry to private channels, and memorable Discord roles. This strategy helps bootstrap the Talus community on Sui and identifies the core group of early adopters who will benefit most when Talus Agents and Nexus officially go live. Tallys holders might also be considered for the $US airdrop and can unlock early access for idol.fun features, boosted rewards, or special creator slots.

Talus has raised a total of $10M. Their rounds were led by Polychain Capital, a tier-one venture fund recognized for supporting foundational protocols. Other participants included Foresight Ventures, Animoca, Geek Cartel, Echo, along with angel investors from projects such as Polygon, Sentient, Allora, and 0G Labs. This investment reflects growing confidence in the narrative of decentralized AI agents, a trend that has gained momentum following the boom of large language models in 2023-2024. It highlights the belief among leading investors in the potential of transparent, verifiable, and decentralized AI infrastructure.

Beyond capital, Talus has also secured strategic partnerships across the AI and blockchain ecosystem. In particular, Sui and Walrus provide the core infrastructure that allows Talus to deploy, test, and scale its products, laying the groundwork for a sustainable network of on-chain AI agents.

Together, this combination of capital, conviction, and partnerships gives Talus a solid foundation to move steadily toward its vision of an Autonomous AI Economy.

AI agents are evolving from simple tools into autonomous actors capable of shaping digital economies. By combining the transparency of blockchains with the intelligence of AI, we now have the foundation for Prediction AI. Where outcomes are verifiable, markets are fair, and participation is open to anyone. With idol.fun as the first consumer gateway and AvA Gaming as the proof point, the Talus ecosystem shows how entertainment, speculation, and infrastructure converge into a new digital economy. This is just the beginning: the same primitives that power AvA matches will extend into finance, social networks, and beyond, ushering in a future where autonomous agents drive both innovation and value creation.

Talus Network powers AvA Gaming & Prediction AI with on-chain agents, $US token, and Polychain backing, shaping the future of AI in Web3.

How Talus Network Aims to Disrupt Web3 with AvA Gaming and Prediction AI

Linea: Everything You Must Know Before Its TGE

“Linea is the Ethereum L2 built to serve one purpose: to strengthen Ethereum.” 

After Ethereum’s strong price growth over the past 2 months and as it approaches a new peak, Linea is the project most eagerly awaited by the community thanks to the upcoming TGE information.

This article will provide information and in-depth analysis related to Linea that you may need to know before the TGE takes place.

 (Joseph Lubin, Ethereum co-founder), backed by $725M funding, leveraging products like 

 for faster, more secure transactions, improving Ethereum’s scalability.

, which is a toolkit that helps projects easily deploy new Layer 2s (L2s).- Over 

 peaked at $1.2B; recovering pre-TGE with strong 

Linea is a L2 born from the strategic vision of ConsenSys, one of the leading companies in the Ethereum ecosystem. The main founder of ConsenSys is Joseph Lubin, who co-founded Ethereum alongside Vitalik Buterin and other pioneers in 2014. With extensive experience from Wall Street (formerly worked at Goldman Sachs) and a key role in building Ethereum, Lubin has led ConsenSys to become the “cradle” of essential products in the Ethereum ecosystem, such as Infura and MetaMask, which now have over 30 million monthly users.

Linea was first introduced in 2023, when ConsenSys launched its testnet under the name ConsenSys zkEVM. By July 2023, the project officially launched its mainnet under the name Linea, symbolizing the continuous “flow” of data and value on Ethereum. ConsenSys, the parent company of Linea, has raised $725 million from major investors such as Microsoft, SoftBank, Dragonfly Capital, and Coinbase Ventures. The team behind Linea includes experts from Ethereum’s open-source community, with an Ecosystem Council consisting of ConsenSys, ENS, Status, EigenLabs, and SharpLink, which is the largest ETH-holding company in the world.

The core technology of Linea is zkEVM, which is a version of the EVM that uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) to verify transactions off-chain before submitting them to Ethereum’s base layer.

On Ethereum’s development journey, to stay competitive against the rise of other Layer 1s (L1s) like Solana, Ethereum must solve the scalability problem. Rollups are considered the most optimal solution and the foundation for the current L2 systems. Rollups are divided into two types:

Optimistic rollups are compatible with the EVM, allowing developers to build dApps easily. In contrast, ZK rollups offer superior advantages over optimistic rollups in terms of security and speed but lack full EVM compatibility, making dApp deployment more difficult. Therefore, to solve the problem of ZK rollups not being EVM-compatible, zkEVM was created to allow developers to deploy dApps directly in the EVM environment without needing to change code or rewrite smart contracts.

Rollups work by aggregating multiple L2 transactions into a batch, then submitting that batch to L1 for verification. The key difference is that Optimistic rollups submit fraud proofs to L1, while ZK rollups submit validity proofs (or ZK proofs).

Fraud Proof: Assumes all transactions are valid unless proven otherwise. This process takes 7 days before the transaction is verified and recorded on L1. This is also why withdrawals from L2 to L1 take 7 days.

ZK Proof: Each batch submitted to L1 comes with a cryptographic proof that immediately verifies the validity, offering higher speed and security. Therefore, withdrawals from L2 to L1 with ZK rollups only take a few hours.

According to Vitalik, zkEVM is divided into four main types, each with a different level of compatibility with the EVM.

Type 1 (fully Ethereum-equivalent): Perfect compatibility with Ethereum, but lower scalability.

Type 2 (fully EVM-equivalent): Perfect equivalence at the VM level, improved but relatively lower scalability.

Type 2.5 (EVM-equivalent, except for gas costs): Equivalence at the VM level + better scalability, but not compatible with all dApps & tools (although most).

Type 3 (almost EVM-equivalent): Easier to build + better scalability, but not compatible with all dApps & tools (although most).

Type 4 (high-level-language equivalent): Easiest to build + highest scalability, but less compatibility with dApps & tools.

Linea is a Type 2 zkEVM, meaning it is fully EVM-equivalent but not quite Ethereum-equivalent. That is, it looks exactly like Ethereum “from within”, but has some differences on the outside, particularly in data structures. A Type 2 ZK-EVM is capable of running all existing applications on Ethereum without any code modification. However, it needs to make a few minor infrastructure changes to simplify development and speed up proof generation. Type 2 strikes a better balance between compatibility and performance than Type 3 and Type 4, and it has the potential to evolve toward Type 1.

Linea has undergone a significant upgrade, reducing gas fees with the transition from Alpha V1 to Alpha V2. In V1, transactions on Linea were aggregated into a single batch and submitted to L1 via a ZK proof. Starting from V2, Linea has updated the system to allow multiple batches to be combined into a single aggregator proof, reducing the fixed cost from 1 batch/proof to 30 batches/proof. After this update, gas fees on Linea dropped by 66%, making it the 7th cheapest L2 in terms of transaction fees, thereby significantly improving user experience.

Unlike many L2s following the token-first model, Linea remains loyal to Ethereum. Linea’s Core Features focus on three key pillars:

The Dual-burn mechanism works by using the $ETH collected from user transaction fees to increase the value of the token, where 20% of the fees are burned in $ETH, and 80% are used to buy & burn $LINEA.

At present, daily transaction fees on Linea are around $12k, but recently started to trend upward, reaching approximately $70k on August 13. To create real impact on the price of both $ETH and the future $LINEA token, the key challenge for Linea is to attract and retain users, proving that its model is effective.

On most other L2s, $ETH is only used to pay for transaction fees. However, on Linea, users can also earn native yield by staking within the network. Linea has partnered with Lido, a decentralized staking solution that allows bridged $ETH to be automatically staked on their platform. The yield generated is then redirected back to L2 to support liquidity (DEXs, lending, perps) and fund incentive programs.

Yield from staking not only retains long-term capital on Linea and reduces liquidity providers exiting the protocol after incentives end, but also acts as a direct driver for TVL, trading volume, and transaction fees. When these metrics remain high, the dual-burn mechanism can operate at full effectiveness, putting downward pressure on supply and increasing long-term token value.

These mechanisms can help attract the $ETH holder community and create the potential for a liquidity flywheel within the Linea ecosystem, as seen with Blast. With a similar native yield mechanism, Blast once reached over $2.22B in TVL before rapidly declining due to the absence of major DeFi protocols like Aave and a lack of standout dApps to retain users post-airdrop. However, Aave is already live on Linea, and with notable names like @eigen_labs and @Consensys behind it, Linea may avoid repeating Blast’s mistakes.

Not only does Linea build its own zkEVM L2, but it also introduces Linea Stack, a toolkit that helps projects easily deploy new L2s, similar to OP Stack or Polygon SDK. Notably, Status is the first L2 project built using Linea Stack. This strategy allows Linea to:

Create network effects from multiple chains using the same technology, ensuring that individual blockchains can interoperate and function as a unified system, support each other technically, and attract users, similar to the relationship among projects in Optimism’s Superchain.

Target revenue from infrastructure, not just gas fees.

DeFi on Linea is taking shape. The liquidity backbone centers around DEXs and lending protocols, featuring familiar names like Aave, PancakeSwap, and SushiSwap, along with supporting components such as Stargate (bridge) and Satori (perps). In addition, Linea has over 400 partners across DeFi, infrastructure, NFTs, and AI, covering all the essential pieces for Linea to stay aligned with future narratives.

Linea’s TVL peaked at $1.2 billion following the launch of the Linea Surge program in May 2024, which was a points-based incentive campaign designed to attract TVL and activate the DeFi ecosystem, running until November 2024. The campaign created a strong acquisition effect, driving around 800k daily active addresses (DAA) and rapidly boosting both TVL and user numbers. However, both TVL and DAA dropped significantly after the program ended, highlighting the unsustainable retention, a common problem with large-scale incentive campaigns where the primary user motivation is short-term rewards rather than long-term ecosystem value.

Currently, Linea’s TVL is recovering, partly due to the rising price of $ETH and the pre-TGE momentum, which has drawn increased attention to the ecosystem. In the pre-TGE phase, Linea’s TVL grew by approximately 60%, even without any incentive program. Etherex, a DEX on Linea, surpassed $120M in TVL just two weeks after launch, indicating that capital is starting to flow back into the Linea ecosystem.

Instead of allocating tokens to VCs, Linea’s tokenomics aims to put the ecosystem first, directing the majority of funds toward users, builders, Ethereum public goods, and R&D.

10% Airdropped to early contributors and users (fully unlocked)

1% Strategic builder airdrop (discretionary)

4% Liquidity providers from the Linea Surge (unlocked)

60% Ecosystem Fund (long-term growth, grants, infra)

15% Consensys Treasury (5-year lockup, non-transferable)

Fund management is handled by The Linea Consortium, a group of credible Ethereum organizations that have made significant contributions to strengthening Ethereum, including @eigen_labs, @ensdomains, @SharpLinkGaming, @ethstatus, and @Consensys.

However, $LINEA currently does not have a specific utility: it is not used for gas and currently has no governance rights. While other Ethereum L2s use token utility primarily for voting governance, in the case of $LINEA, the project has announced: “There is no tokenholder governance in the LINEA system”. This is a deliberate and strategic action for the token to not be used for governance. Instead, strategic decisions regarding token emissions, grants, incentives, and fund allocations are overseen by the Linea Consortium. The main source of revenue comes from ETH transaction fees, so token holders only benefit indirectly through the mechanism that burns 80% of those fees. Additionally, since ConsenSys (the parent company of LINEA) is a traditional company, this may be a way for the project to limit legal risks from the SEC by not assigning any use case to the token until there is a clear regulatory framework.

The token is set to be released at the 10th of September, 2025.

Financially, Linea did not raise funds directly, but its parent company, ConsenSys, has raised $725M - a large enough amount to support long-term development of the project. In addition, ConsenSys holds core Ethereum products like MetaMask and Infura, which can easily support builders and applications within the Linea ecosystem. Moreover, by launching after other L2s like Arbitrum, ZkSync, and Blast, Linea has the opportunity to learn from and leverage their strengths, while avoiding the weaknesses that led to failures.

According to the roadmap, Linea aims to achieve its primary goal of becoming a Type 1 zkEVM by Q1 2026. Following that, by Q2 2026, performance is expected to reach 0.5 gGas/s (approximately 5,000 TPS), which would fulfill the objective to scale Ethereum, deliver a great user experience, and enable real-time proofs on Ethereum. However, that goal is still a long way off. In the near term, the most important updates from Linea will be the implementation of the dual-burn mechanism and Native Yield. Overall, Linea can be seen as a bold experiment: building a public good L2 with ETH native yield, no VCs, and currently no direct token utility, with a mission of positioning itself as an L2 that brings value back to Ethereum. However, this “no token utility” approach also raises important questions. While it helps reduce regulatory risks and reinforces an Ethereum-first alignment, the lack of inherent utility could affect $LINEA’s long-term value capture and token demand. Whether this model can prove sustainable remains to be seen. Lets wait and see how Linea will strengthen Ethereum.

Deep dive into Linea before itsTGE. Explore its zkEVM tech, Ethereum alignment, tokenomics, dual-burn model, ecosystem growth, and future outlook.

Deep Dive: Linea and What You Need to Know Before TGE

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